“Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed; I stay a little longer, as one stays To cover up the embers that still burn.”

He did stay a little longer; but the embers that still burnt in him refused to be covered up. He would fain have ceased writing, and used to say, “It’s a great thing to know when to stop”; but he could not stop, and did not stop, till the last. He continued to publish from time to time, in the magazines, poems which showed a clearness of vision and a perfection of workmanship such as he never had equalled at any period of his life. Indeed it may be said that his finest poems were his last. Of these a small collection appeared under the title of Keramos, and other Poems (1878). Besides these, in the years 1875-1878 he edited a collection of Poems of Places in thirty-one small volumes. In 1880 appeared Ultima Thule, meant to be his last work, and it was nearly so. In October 1881 he wrote a touching sonnet on the death of President Garfield, and in January 1882, when the hand of death was already upon him, his poem, Hermes Trismegistus, in which he gives utterance, in language as rich as that of the early gods, to that strange feeling of awe without fear, and hope without form, with which every man of spotless life and upright intellect withdraws from the phenomena of time to the realities of eternity.

In the last years of his life he suffered a great deal from rheumatism, and was, as he sometimes cheerfully said, “never free from pain.” Still he remained as sunny and genial as ever, looking from his Cambridge study windows across the Brighton meadows to the Brookline hills, or enjoying the “free wild winds of the Atlantic,” and listening to “The Bells of Lynn” in his Nahant home. He still continued to receive all visitors, and to take occasional runs up to Castine and Portland, the homes of his family. About the beginning of 1882, however, a serious change took place in his condition. Dizziness and want of strength confined him to his room for some time, and, although after some weeks he partially recovered, his elasticity and powers were gone. On the 19th of March he was seized with what proved to be peritonitis, and he died on the 24th. The poet was buried two days afterwards near his “three friends” in Mount Auburn cemetery. The regret for his loss was universal; for no modern man was ever better loved or better deserved to be loved.

Longfellow was made an LL.D. of Bowdoin College in 1828, at the age of twenty-one, of Harvard in 1859 and of Cambridge (England) in 1868, and D.C.L. of Oxford in 1869. In 1873 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Science, and in 1877 of the Spanish Academy.

In person, Longfellow was rather below middle height, broad shouldered and well built. His head and face were extremely handsome, his forehead broad and high, his eyes full of clear, warming fire, his nose straight and graceful, his chin and lips rich and full of feeling as those of the Praxitelean Hermes, and his voice low, melodious and full of tender cadences. His hair, originally dark, became, in his later years, silvery white, and its wavy locks combined with those of his flowing beard to give him that leonine appearance so familiar through his later portraits. Charles Kingsley said of Longfellow’s face that it was the most beautiful human face he had ever seen. A bust to his memory was erected in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1884.

In Longfellow, the poet was the flower and fruit of the man. His nature was essentially poetic, and his life the greatest of his poems. Those who knew only the poems he wrote could form but a faint notion of the harmony, the sweetness, the manliness and the tenderness of that which he lived. What he would have been as a poet, if, instead of visiting Europe in early life and drinking in the spirit of the middle ages under the shadows of cathedral towers, he had, like Whittier, grown old amid American scenery and life, we can only guess from his earlier poems, which are as naturalistic, fresh and unmystical as could be desired; but certain it is that, from his long familiarity with the medieval view of nature, and its semi-pagan offspring, the romantic view, he was brought, for the greater part of his life, to look upon the world of men and things either as the middle scene of a miracle play, with a heaven of rewarding happiness above and a purgatory of purifying pain below, or else as a garment concealing, while it revealed, spiritual forms of unfathomed mystery. During this time he could hear “the trailing garments of the night sweep through her marble halls,” and see “the stars come out to listen to the music of the seas.” Later on, as he approached his second youth (he was spared a second childhood), he tended to a more pagan view. About the time when he was writing The Mask of Pandora, he could see “in the sunset Jason’s fleece of gold,” and hear “the waves of the distracted sea piteously calling and lamenting” his lost friend. But through all the periods of his life his view of the world was essentially religious and subjective, and, consequently, his manner of dealing with it hymnal or lyric. This fact, even more than his merits as an artist, serves to account for his immense popularity. Too well-informed, too appreciative and too modest to deem himself the peer of the “grand old masters,” or one of “those far stars that come in sight once in a century,” he made it his aim to write something that should “make a purer faith and manhood shine in the untutored heart,” and to do this in the way that should best reach that heart. This aim determined at once his choice of subjects and his mode of treating them.

The subjects of Longfellow’s poetry are, for the most part, aspects of nature as influencing human feeling, either directly or through historical association, the tender or pathetic sides and incidents of life, or heroic deeds preserved in legend or history. He had a special fondness for records of human devotion and self-sacrifice, whether they were monkish legends, Indian tales, Norse drápas or bits of American history. His mode of treatment is subjective and lyric. No matter what form his works assume, whether the epic, as in Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish and Hiawatha, the dramatic, as in The Spanish Student, The Golden Legend and The Mask of Pandora, or the didactic, as in The Psalm of Life and many of the minor poems; they are all subjective. This is not the highest praise that can be given to works of art; but it implies less dispraise in Longfellow’s case than in almost any other, by reason of his noble subjectivity.

If we look in Longfellow’s poetry for originality of thought, profound psychological analysis or new insights into nature, we shall be disappointed. Though very far from being hampered by any dogmatic philosophical or religious system of the past, his mind, until near the end, found sufficient satisfaction in the Christian view of life to make it indifferent to the restless, inquiring spirit of the present, and disinclined to play with any more recent solution of life’s problems. He had no sympathy with either scepticism or formal dogmatism, and no need to hazard rash guesses respecting man’s destiny. He disliked the psychological school of art, believing it to be essentially morbid and unhealthy. He had no sympathy with the tendency represented by George Eliot, or with any attempt to be analytic in art. He held art to be essentially synthetic, creative and manifesting, not analytic, destructive or questioning. Hence he never strove to draw from nature some new secret, or to show in her relations never discovered before. His aim was to impress upon her familiar facts and aspects the seal of his own gracious nature. A man in intellect and courage, yet without conceit or bravado; a woman in sensibility and tenderness, yet without shrinking or weakness; a saint in purity of life and devotion of heart, yet without asceticism or religiosity; a knight-errant in hatred of wrong and contempt of baseness, yet without self-righteousness or cynicism; a prince in dignity and courtesy, yet without formality or condescension; a poet in thought and feeling, yet without jealousy or affectation; a scholar in tastes and habits, yet without aloofness or bookishness; a dutiful son, a loving husband, a judicious father, a trusty friend, a useful citizen and an enthusiastic patriot,—he united in his strong, transparent humanity almost every virtue under heaven. A thoroughly healthy, well-balanced, harmonious nature, accepting life as it came, with all its joys and sorrows, and living it beautifully and hopefully, without canker and without uncharity. No man ever lived more completely in the light than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Perhaps the most remarkable traits in Longfellow’s character were his accessibility and his charity. Though a great worker, he seemed always to have time for anything he was asked to do. He was never too busy to see a caller, to answer a letter, or to assist, by word or deed, any one that needed assistance. His courtesy to all visitors, even to strangers and children who called to look at him, or who, not venturing to call, hung about his garden-gate in order to catch a glimpse of him, was almost a marvel. He always took it for granted that they had come to see Washington’s study, and, accordingly, took the greatest interest in showing them that. He never, as long as he could write, was known to refuse his autograph, and so far was he from trying to protect himself from intruders that he rarely drew the blinds of his study windows at night, though that study was on the ground floor and faced the street. His acts of charity, though performed in secret, were neither few nor small. Of him it may be said with perfect truth, “He went about doing good”; and not with his money merely, but also with his presence and his encouragement. To how many sad hearts did he come like an angel, with the rich tones of his voice waking harmonics of hope, where before there had been despair and silence? How many young literary people, disappointed at the unsuccess of their first attempts, did he comfort and spur on to renewed and higher efforts! How careful he was to quench no smoking flax! How utterly free he was from jealousy or revengefulness! While poor, morbid Edgar Allan Poe was writing violent and scurrilous articles upon him, accusing him of plagiarism and other literary misdemeanours, he was delivering enthusiastic lectures to his classes on Poe’s poetry. His charity was unbounded. Once, when the present writer proposed to the president of the Harvard University Visiting Committee that Longfellow should be placed on that committee, the president replied: “What would be the use? Longfellow could never be brought to find fault with anybody or anything.” And it was true. His whole life was bathed in that sympathy, that love which suffers long and envies not, which forgives unto seventy times seven times, and as many more if need be. Even in his last years, when loss of friends and continual physical pain made life somewhat “cold, and dark and dreary” for him, he never complained, lamented or blamed the arrangements of nature, and the only way in which it was possible to know that he suffered was through his ever-increasing delight in the health and strength of younger men. His whole nature was summed up in the lines of his favourite poet:—

“Luce intellettual, piena d’amore. Amor di vero ben, pien di letizia. Letizia che trascende ogni dolzore.”